Looking Back: 15 Years of PC Magazine

On August 12, 1981, IBM executives held a press conference in New York to introduce a momentous new computer--the IBM Personal Computer, or the PC, as it became known. Immediately thereafter, work began on a new magazine, which would publish its first issue in early 1982 PC Magazine.

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On August 12, 1981, IBM executives held a press conference in New York to introduce a momentous new computer--the IBM Personal Computer, or the PC, as it became known. Immediately thereafter, work began on a new magazine, which would publish its first issue in early 1982 PC Magazine.

Today, 15 years later, both the PC and PC Magazine are still going strong. We celebrate the continued success of both with this issue. But while it would be tempting to start our history with the first issue of PC Magazine, or even with the introduction of the IBM PC, that would leave out too much of the story.

The personal computer industry dates back to the introduction of the first microprocessor, the Intel 4004, in 1971. But the industry really took off following the January 1975 issue of the Ziff-Davis magazine Popular Electronics, which trumpeted the "Project Breakthrough!" of the Altair 8800, from MITS, which the magazine dubbed "the world's first minicomputer kit to rival commercial models."

By today's standards, that initial kit developed by Ed Roberts, who headed MITS, a small electronics company in Albuquerque, New Mexico, was quite limited. It was based on Intel's 8080 microprocessor and had only 256 bytes of memory.

Priced at a very affordable $397, the Altair was the first personal computer widely available to the general public. It attracted hundreds of orders from electronics enthusiasts.

One who noticed this seminal event was a young Honeywell programmer named Paul Allen, who showed the Popular Electronics article to an old friend, a Harvard freshman named Bill Gates. The pair quickly joined forces to write a version of BASIC for the Altair. Soon, Allen went to work for MITS as its director of software, and shortly thereafter Gates left Harvard to join Allen in Albuquerque and to start a company that would later be named Microsoft. (Another early MITS employee, David Bunnell, would later start a number of computer magazines, including PC Magazine.)

With the Altair's introduction, the personal computer industry took off. The year 1977 saw an explosion of interest in personal computers and the introduction of a long succession of machines--the Commodore PET, the Radio Shack TRS-80, and most important, Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs's Apple II.

The Apple II quickly developed into its own standard, helped out enormously by Wozniak's 1978 design for an inexpensive floppy disk drive and--even more important--by Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston's VisiCalc, the first electronic spreadsheet. With the introduction of VisiCalc, business people suddenly had a reason for using personal computers. It wasn't just a hobbyist's world anymore.

The rest of the decade saw dozens of very different designs, as one new company after another tried to define a unique combination of power, price, performance, and features. Machines introduced in this period ranged from offerings for home and hobbyist users--such as Commodore's Vic-20 and 64, Atari's 400 series, and Texas Instruments' TI 99--to more business-oriented devices, such as a series of machines from Tandy/Radio Shack and a host of designs that ran Digital Research's operating system CP/M, which was written by personal computing pioneer Gary Kildall.

Because the market was growing so fast, and because in those early days backward compatibility didn't mean much, the time was marked by a period of hardware creativity never seen since. And of course, software began to grow as well, with the rapid appearance of a variety of early programming languages, games, and even business applications, such as the popular word processor WordStar.

Before long, nobody viewed personal computers as toys or hobbies but as devices for personal productivity with clear business applications. The era of the personal computer was firmly established. And IBM, which long had dominated mainframe computers, wanted a piece of the action.

The IBM of 1980, much more than the IBM of today, was not a company accustomed to fast-moving markets and consumer sales. It sold business machines--primarily computers and typewriters--to businesses, using its own technology and relying very heavily on a very structured system of sales and service to large accounts.

The PC business required something different. This new market was moving quite fast, and a new entrant would have to move quickly. And it would need to target individuals as well as businesses, even if the ultimate aim was to continue to sell business computers. This is what William C. Lowe, laboratory director of IBM's Entry Level Systems (ELS) unit in Boca Raton, Florida, told IBM's Corporate Management Committee, including IBM president John Opel, in July 1980.

Lowe told the committee that IBM needed to build a personal computer and that there was room in the market that Apple and others had left untapped. But, he told the committee, it couldn't be built within IBM's standard culture of the time. So they gave him the freedom to recruit 12 engineers to form a task force, called Project Chess, and to build a prototype computer.

In the next month, Lowe's task force had a number of meetings with other players in the young industry and made a number of key decisions that ultimately would affect the PC business for years to come. One was the decision to sell IBM's personal computer through retail stores in addition to offering it through IBM's own commissioned sales staff. But perhaps the company's most important decision was to use an "open architecture": to choose the basic components and operating system from sources outside of IBM. It was a big departure for IBM, which up to that point typically had designed all the major components of its machines.

In August, Lowe and two engineers, Bill Sydnes and Lew Eggebrecht, demonstrated a prototype to the Corporate Management Committee, which approved the basic plan and gave Project Chess the go-ahead to create a personal computer, code-named Acorn.

To head the group that pulled it together, Lowe turned to Philip D. "Don" Estridge, another longtime IBM employee, who worked at the Boca Raton labs. Estridge recruited a team that included Sydnes, who headed engineering, Dan Wilkie, who was in charge of manufacturing, and H.L. "Sparky" Sparks, who headed sales.

One early decision they had to make was to choose the processor to power the PC. The task force had decided they wanted a 16-bit computer, because it would be more powerful and easier to program than existing 8-bit machines. Intel had recently announced the 16-bit 8086, but Sydnes later said that IBM was concerned that the 8086 would be too powerful and compete too much with other IBM entries.

So instead they chose the 8088, a version of the chip that had an 8-bit bus and a 16-bit internal structure. This 8-bit technology offered the added benefit of working with existing 8-bit expansion cards and with relatively inexpensive 8-bit devices, such as controller chips, which could thus be incorporated easily and inexpensively into the new machine.

Another key decision was software. In July, members of the task force went to visit Digital Research to ask the firm to port its CP/M operating system to the 8086 architecture. Legend has it that founder Gary Kildall was flying his plane at the time. Whatever the reason, Kildall's wife, Dorothy, and DR's attorneys didn't sign the nondisclosure agreement IBM presented. So the IBM team left and flew north to Seattle to meet with Microsoft, from which they had hoped to obtain a version of BASIC.

Microsoft officials signed an agreement with IBM for BASIC, and soon Bill Gates and company were discussing not only BASIC but also an operating system. Quickly thereafter, Microsoft acquired an 8086 operating system that had various names, including Quick and Dirty DOS, or QDOS, written by Tim Patterson at a company called Seattle Computer Products. Microsoft further developed this operating system and licensed it to IBM, which sold it as PC-DOS.

Fevered months of putting together the hardware and software ensued. Then, on Wednesday, August 12, 1981, almost exactly a year after Project Chess was given the go-ahead, IBM introduced the IBM Personal Computer. Sold initially at ComputerLand outlets and Sears Business Centers, that first PC--with an 8088 CPU, 64K of RAM, and a single-sided, 160K floppy disk drive--had a list price of $2,880.

When the IBM PC shipped in October, Estridge--by then considered the father of the PC--and his team had a runaway hit.

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